The Virginian is quite good at not telegraphing its plot developments. I like that in a book.



A wren looked into the bag for a moment this afternoon. There hasn't been any other activity in that regard, as far as we know, the past few days. Mom wonders if the parents are preparing for another batch.



Finally ironed that nasty little wrinkle out of my program. I figure anything more from this point on is pretty much icing.

Been reading The Virginian. Good stuff. For some reason I keep hearing the titular character in Jimmy Stewart's voice, rather than the obvious John Wayne's. Go figure.



One more kink to iron out and I think the program I've been working on should be pretty well functional. Good grief but it's been a nasty kink, though.

- updated the antivirus

- d/l'ed py2exe and utterly failed to get it to do anything

- had another meeting with the professor I'll be TA'ing (Note: get college email account drained!)

- worked a bit on the negatives list on the college wiki

- got the hold cleared (FINALLY!) and got registered for two actual classes (will go back tomorrow and see about getting the research thing put through) (Note: Still need the sticker!)

- bought a 3-subject notebook (not too thrilled with last semester's experience, but I won't have Dr. H. this time so it might be okay) and academic planner thingy (yay tie-dye is back)

- spent the B&N gift certificate on a couple of novels (Science section didn't have anything interesting, Python books were either useless or expensive, and I wasn't sure whether to get a fold-out map or a map book)



[edit] P.S. Check out my sidebar if you haven't done so within the past month or so. It's new* and improved** and shiny*** and stuff****.

* partly
** possibly
*** painfully
**** proverbially

OK, so my memory oversimplified the bit with Hubble, but it's still bad. And seriously, the rest of the science is far worse than I remember. Electronics may be a weak spot of mine, but I know enough E&M (even a grade schooler ought to know enough) that the writer makes me look like a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize. 'Fifth Law of Charge Tug-of-War', my fifth foot.

Oh, and here's a bit of news for him: THREE-BODY PROBLEM. STILL UNSOLVED.

I have a bit of an urge to go look up just how thoroughly he ripped off for the one scene.


On a very related note, I've been reading too much riffy stuff lately.

It hurts to be young again
When the only way to be young again
Turns out to be spending two hours
In a big used books store


Well, I probably spent about three hours total today "discovering" an art store and a book store.

ArtMart (which I just happened to check into in passing) looks to lean heavily toward painting and drawing and such (and how!), but I bought a few "office supplies" things from it for my brother. They're rather amusing in a quiet way, so I think he'll like them.

Then on to my target, The Book House on Manchester Road, where I probably spent a full two hours just browsing around. It's having a nice little clearance sale (nudge to the St. Louisans [hi mcmac74656]), not in the sense of "we're going out of business", but rather in the sense of "we gotta clear some of these books out of the way before someone trips over the boxes of books we have lying around". Wow. So many books that I didn't have the slightest interest in, and yet so many that looked interesting or even begged to be taken home. There were a "historical fiction" version of Lewis and Clark's trip, titled something to the effect of I Should Be Quite Satisfied With Your Company; an amusing-looking pre-teen novel about aliens in black suits by Gene DeWeese; a collection of essays about detective fiction; several Discworld novels; and various-and-sundry other books of varying inanity. In the end, I didn't find anything that I could be sure would be a good gift for anyone, and I dumped the DeWeese and detective fiction books in favor of retaining a collection of essays about writing.

Oh, and apparently somebody's written a rather sizable novel in the form of a polite (judging from the blurbage) letter from Heathcliff to Catherine explaining what he did while away from home. o_O Riiiiiiiiight . . .

I only met the Obligatory Store Pet on the way out--a furry dark-gray cat who apparently had learned to avoid snugging up to a person unless they had already showed interest in petting it.

It took me about 50 minutes to get home by Hanley-Rock Road-170, partly due to slightly icky traffic on Hanley and 170.

I was at a Borders bookstore just now, and in the Bargains stuff out front were several copies of a paperback. Voyages of Imagination or something like that. It was basically a "Star Trek novel Companion".

I leafed through a bit. Looked like the format was: Image of the front cover + Blurb from the back + Author's commentary, if any.

Just $4, but it was chunky like a monkey. Understandable since they had SO MANY titles to get through, but I wasn't convinced that the commentaries (the only part that I'd be especially interested in) were especially present. And we really don't have room in the house for chunky Trek books--enough Trek as it is, y'know.

Anyway, has anyone out there read through this book a little moreso? If so, is the commentaries content robust enough for me to maybe go look for it in a library or something? Pump It *thumbs up* or Dump It *thumbs down* in the comments, please!

Couple of things I noticed that I found amusing: One of the entries ended with something to the effect of "Dafyyd ab Hugh [sp?] does not have any personal recollections of writing this book." Probably the standard filler for when they couldn't get the author to say anything, but rather amusing phrasing, I thought. Also the entry for the infamous Triangle ended by talking about how the notorious authors had invented a something-or-other system to help children with some mental-disorder-type thingy. No idea what the rest of the entry talked about (zoomy zoomy, y'know?) but I found the image of the editors & authors striving to get a few solid paragraphs out of ANYTHING BUT the novel they were supposed to be addressing distinctly amusing as well.




Re: the MLB playoffs: I'm a St. Louisan and my dad's from Arizona. If you follow MLB, you should be able to reconstruct my rooting interests from that.

Over the past few days:
- I have gotten a new bedspread
- we have been painting the kitchen and hallway
- we have switched to satellite TV
So yes, I've been a bit busy in a legitimate sense for once.



Things I learned/decided because of the dream last night:
- A Redwall book written partly or entirely by Diane Duane could be really, really neat, even if possibly lopsided in a precedent-setting sense.
- I have literary theories that even I don't explicitly know about.
- Nutcases who see nothing wrong with shooting someone (himself? I must have heard that wrong . . .) in the throat three times in a busy mall can be quite friendly and reasonable with non-targets.
- There was a transition period at the end of the dream that was quite interesting in retrospect. I was obviously doing "awake" thinking at one point, because after advancing the alluded-to theory, citing roughly two exceptions, and beginning to elaborate upon the theory, I suddenly and spontaneously thought of one or two more exceptions and promptly named them correctly. (It is true that at least one of these exceptions, upon further review, has been deemed a dubious sort of exception, but that happens when one is wide-awake as well.) And during the last minute, my voice suddenly became whispery or hoarse, although this didn't seem to affect the audience. I tried to raise my voice but couldn't bring myself to put yelling effort into it. And then I woke up.
- Deduction from this is that I may talk during my sleep, or possibly during my awakening period, but most likely only in a murmur.
- Further deduction is that I do indeed "hear" during dreams. This has been unclear before now.
- Other further deduction is that my "consciousness" starts getting warmed up well before I am properly awake. My senses evidently do likewise: my ears reported silence to my brain, which reacted by being suspicious of my unconsciousness's claim that I was speaking audibly.



We started Acts in Sunday school (with the wrong series of booklets, but the others decided to not bother with exchanging for the ones we wanted). One of the points the booklet made in passing was that something-or-other (Peter's little sermon?) happened and was recorded as a signal that Jesus's death was a result of a divine plan, not just an 'accident of history'. I like it whenever this comes up, because it's important to remember that a lot of what God does is invisible to the unsuspecting eye.

Anyway, afterwards, I dropped by the room across from the nursery to tell D. that we wouldn't be exchanging the booklets, but she wasn't there at the moment--just Mom and another lady. So I took the extra booklets up to where we keep the extra stuff between sessions. The strips of paper I kept there for weekly attendance sheets were gone. They're left on a table by the door, so I figured someone else had taken them for some reason. There was plenty of time before the service, so I decided to make some more before next week. I tore a few pages out of one of the legal pads and found that all of the scissors had indeed been relocated to across from the nursery downstairs (I keep forgetting/hoping otherwise), so I had to go all the way back down there to cut the sheets in half to make proper strips.

Now, there was a "pile" of random stuff on the upstairs landing. This happens every once in a while and is usually followed by people carting it downstairs for a rummage sale. On the way back up, D. and a few young boys were on the stairs. D. was telling the boys to cart it downstairs. I told D. our decision about the booklets, dropped off the paper strips, and returned to help out. One of the boxes staring me in the face was open and had a plate on top among other breakables, so I took charge of that one. This being between Sunday school and service, there were other people going up and down the stairs, but we managed to get around them fine. The boys were going back up for another trip, so I went along. Lo and behold, one of the few boxes remaining was open and had breakable Christmas ornaments on top. So I picked that one to carry down. (The boys seemed to prefer the large, heavy boxes. Figures.)

After all that, I was back on the "main" floor when Mom came up to me and handed me a few strips of paper, telling me she had found them in the room across from the nursery (I keep wanting to say "infirmary", probably Redwall Abbey has no "nursery" proper). So I went back upstairs and added them to the others.

This all may seem rather pointlessly roundabout (especially when written out), but what if I had been able to go up there just the first time to drop everything off? I wouldn't have been around to notice that the rummage pile was being shifted downstairs, and one of those boxes might've been dropped as well . . . . The capper is that I got the previously cut strips of paper "back" at the end, plus interest. All in all, I feel rather like I've been through a rather subtle gambit-trap. :-)

Wow, the Cardinals and Reds are really smacking each other around right now.


Anyway, a month or two back, D. came along and said the church wanted to give me a gift for 'graduation' and would I pick something from the Cokesbury catalog? So I looked it over and finally I noticed a little booklet about John Wesley and his teachings and thought "That looks pretty interesting, I'd like to learn more about him." So I asked for that.

It arrived today along with another book (inexpensive so they did a twofer I guess). John Wesley's Message Today by Lovett Weems, Jr. and John Wesley: Holiness of Heart & Life by Charles Yrigoyen, also a Jr. They both are pretty good so far, though in the latter case I've only read the preface and a bit of the first chapter.

I've been attending this Methodist church for . . . well over ten years now, and was in Confirmation class a couple of times, so maybe it shouldn't be so surprising that I seem to agree with or appreciate much of what I've read so far. I would lean towards the good sense and unashamedness of it all being another major factor, but that might be giving myself a little too much credit.

Weems in particular has a nice, clear, concise writing style which is very effective. (Unlike me.) Both are quite interesting indeed.

Did some serious, although still rather ineffectual, straightening up of my room today. Specifically the books. Very happy with what I did, as far as it went. Most of the books that were lying around are now up on shelves. A few "classic"ish books, including Kafka, that remain from five years of college literature classes are now downstairs in the "general pool", so to speak. That silly stack next to my bed that's been like two feet tall for approximately years now is now down to a sensible six inches or so.

Mom, of course, has to drop by afterwards and throw cold water on things by commenting on how I need to keep at it and nothing looks different. I know nothing looks much different, and I "knew", as certainly as one can know such things, that she would say that. But it's fundamentally different, all the same. That pile in the "middle" of the floor had several sizable hardbacks as a "spine" to hold it up and sustain its size and so on. Now those are back on shelves. Blah blah blah.

Part of the problem is my mentality, I know. If I just faced the situation with a clean mental slate and sufficient enthusiasm, I could probably have the whole room looking reasonably presentable within two or three days. If uninterrupted, of course. But as it is, I could probably spend all day putting in consistent and meaningful work and still the room would look "about the same" come nightfall.

Part of the reason is that I do have certain folders to file stuff in, but they aren't in sight at the moment of cleaning and I don't feel inclined to go hunting for them. Stupid, but that's how it is. So I sort and stack stuff up but don't file them, and over time entropy takes over and slides and slops them around and so on.

Part of the reason is I'm a bit like a pack rat who hasn't quite figured out the "giving" part of the whole trading thing.


Anyway, I am pleased that I got the books situation pretty much sorted out. It would be nice if I set aside another folder for, say, collecting loose blank or scrap paper in. Have I done that already? I'm not sure. Oh well.



WinAmp makes some tracks sound distinctly weird. Of course, WMP is hardly innocent of all suspicion in that regard, itself. Silly MIDI software.

No real point to this post, that word just popped spontaneously into my head as I was combatting (combatting? That kinda looks worse, but I dunno . . . ) a very frustrating website and I wanted to preserve it for posterity :~D (that word, not the site [not that I have anything against the site]).


Anyway, been reading The Name of the Rose for Detective Fiction class. Very good stuff but not a light read by any means.


. . . That "combating" just does not look right. I'm going to have to break down and look this up via something-or-other. . . . No, the T is doubled. Okay then. Taken care of.

I was gonna make this into a nice fancy list, but I would have worn out the bracket keys and O and L, so I'm gonna be lazy instead.

This list should not include Classics I bolded in the previous post. It also shouldn't include works that "just seem like they probably are" classics; just ones that are nigh-on unarguably so (sorry, Catton, Black Stallion guy, Jacques, Howe, Heinlein, Schulz, and others). And of course, it's only those that occur to me at this time (at least thirty minutes of it so far O_o).


Prose:

( Read more... )


Plays:

( Read more... )



Poetry (Mebbe Homer's stuff should've gone here. Meh.):

( Read more... )


# of Adding-Stuff Edits: Four!

From steve_mollman:


BOOK MEME! Copy & paste the list. Bold the ones you’ve read. Add four recent reads to the end.

Sadly, I dunno if I can manage 4 recent reads :-S . . .

( Read more... )

I've really liked pretty much all of the ones above that I've read, for various reasons (unsurprisingly).


And since I've been spreading it around everywhere else, I might as well post the link to a really nifty montage of spaceship battles here, too.

Local parade & fair today. Mr. F. was in it with his 8(?)-year-old nephew B., driving his Fairlane or whatever. (Note the importance of the comma in that sentence!) Lots of candy being tossed about, and Penny got a big "bone". She didn't seem to care about it at first, but when we got home she latched on to it. Took it and sat with it sticking out the side of her mouth at the head of my parents' bed, watching Mom make it, which is very unusual as she almost always turns that into playtime. She looked rather bemused, as though she knew she should take special care of this strange goodie but didn't know how to go about it. Or maybe she was just acting innocent until everyone was out of the room, at which point she started trying to dig a hole under Dad's pillow and finally just tried to "tuck" the bone underneath. Then she spent a few minutes trying to "nose" the bedcover into a pile over the bone!

Oh, it might have worked better if she had been on the pillow trying to push the cover off of that, but she wasn't. Finally she gave up and stood at the doorway looking around. I was in the bathroom washing my hands, and then I came out into the hall and turned right (away from the bedroom). Finally she decided the bone was secure enough and started to walk down the hall too. At that point I deliberately remembered to brush my teeth and turned to start walking back up the hall--and Penny immediately turned and dashed back to the bedroom doorway to stand guard. Heheh. She stood there for a while looking around again, finally decided to give up, and went and "dug up" the bone and carried it out to the middle of the hall. She nibbled at it a bit and actually growled whenever someone came too close for her liking (too quietly to make out whether she was saying "my presssshhoussss"). Mom said she finally found a big box of yarn and pushed the bone just as f-a-a-a-a-r down as she could reach, to the bottom of the box. No idea how she intends to get it out, but it's a nice secure place, right?

Only played one of the booths (washer tossing) at the fair but did pretty well at it (bricked the first one and backboarded the fourth in, though it bounced out 8-}).

The "petting farm" was back in full force this year. Camel, two bayyyy-beee goats and big goat, big bunny, chicken, camel, llama, horse, and of course the big tortoise that's always trying to run off. :-) Unfortunately no inging cows though ;~). There were some beautiful shirts/sweaters in the crafts lane as usual; some gorgeous earring/necklace stuff too.

Saw a number of intriguing books (most of which were sci-fi and many of were by Heinlein, plus one by that Philip Dick guy) at the used book sale. There was one titled something like "...I Ain't Giving Up On Me, I'm All I've Got.", punctuation and all, which serves as an excellent snag for those who succumb to the foolishness of always lumping external punctuation together with a quote or title. There was also a hardback that appeared to be one of a series from . . . U.S. Reports? something like that . . . titled Teaching Your Wife To Be A Widow. I did not investigate their proposed method of practice. Only got two books, a collection of Frost's poetry and a collection of Thurber's essays ("I like hi-im. He's silly").




That was kinda weird though, how That Name showed up in my dream and then one of the contestants had it as well, same spelling even. Oh, and I just figured out the reason for the context too. First time I've had a dream invoking That person for ages as best I can remember. Wow.


Will now eat lunch and then attempt to study for the Mod Phys exam on Monday.


Edit: Forgot to mention -- I was surprised by the inflation this year. Almost all the game booths were $2 for a try. Books were still $.50/$1 though.

*wanders over to his bed after the shower*

Lemme see that thing again . . . she said something about it being "personalized" but I sure didn't see anything . . . . .


*looks it over again, and not just in the covers*


. . . Oh, here we go. Yeah, that's a bit oopsie. Heh, it's just some good-natured scribble on the title page, no harm done.

*peers at the signature*

Umm, Pat something? Yeah, Pat's an Irish name. Pat M-something . . . ummm . . . I'm even worse at reading other people's handwriting than at writing my own, but I think I can be forgiven in this case, I'm not sure the person even bothered writing out her name. Just like an autograph.

*click*

*stares at the signature again*

Omigoose.

*looks at the cover, needlessly, and back again* Omigoose! :-O :~D

*looks at the middle line* It just might be. Omigoose! :-O




*click*

Wow, I bet that's when it happened! Maybe? Might be. :-)


Waaait. If they did the personalizification, then . . . but I thought they were in Canada??

*now goes to find out* Well, gee, shows how closely I've been paying attention 8-} . . .

• Renewed driver's license: Managed to beat a miniature rush for the desk in question by maybe five or ten minutes :-). Check.


• That other driving-related matter: Whoops! Wouldntcha know it, not in on the secret list of everything you must have with you. Half the times I screw up it's stuff like this, I just am not prepared for whatever reason...8-| No rush to beat there, just a solid line stretching all the way back to the door. Waited an hour or so to find that out.
  
  • Buuut, I managed to run through the 1/C³ summation again while in line. Things really are getting pretty bizarre all right :~D.


• Went on and finally picked up That Book using the gift card my cousin gave me for Christmas: Check! Turned out it was $25 on the dot, so I paid tax and that was it. Nobody in line at the sales counter.


• Finally got a haircut: Missed the spot to turn on the way back so went on home and had lunch before going back out. The place was empty when I walked in....And then two pairs of customers walked in maybe five minutes after I did. So I somehow beat the rush again!
  
  Been so long since my last cut my hair was getting two-toned. Outer stuff had been bleaching all summer in the sun. Silly me.
  
  And check.

So I'm sitting here with my new book, Three Nights In August. Haven't read much of it yet but I'm really enjoying it :~D. Got rather excited at lunch with anticipation. Heh. Going to sign off very shortly and go read it some more I think.

Copied from ladykatyjane...

Five weird things about me:

I think number theory is fun. (Thus my having "recreational mathematics" or something similar listed in my Interests.)

I've read easily fifteen-plus times as many ST novels as I've watched entire ST episodes.

I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocaine powdI tend to be far too analytical a lot of the time. Not that I'm complaining, but it does slow things down that it shouldn't sometimes.

Finally, a second person on LJ has cited Bruce Catton as being an interest. That still leaves me as being one of only two though...

I think ranting about stupid little things (like the fact that only two LJers show such interest in Catton while, like, thirty billion show such interest in [name a trashy pathetic band]) being the sign of DOOM for Civilization As We Know It can be lots of fun. (I'm not interested in doing it right now though. :~p)

Finally found that song deconstruction :~D! It was later than I'd remembered--Jan. 12th! Anyway, now I can post it around. Muahaha!



In other news, Gogol is indeed still officially hilarious. "The Overcoat" and "Diary of a Madman" are definitely Good Stuff.



(Edit) Oh yeah, also this. Heeheehee...